Decentralized control synthesis for a platoon of autonomous vehicles

An efficient method for synthesis of decentralized controllers for a platoon of autonomous vehicles is presented. Though our results are applicable to land, sea, or air vehicles, our motivation arises from the requirements of underwater vehicles. Difficulties arising from communications bandwidth limitations imposed underwater are addressed by assuming a specific network topology that requires very little communication. While decentralized control synthesis problems are considered to be NP-hard in general, we show that decentralized controllers can be synthesized for the network topology considered using standard control design techniques along with a two-loop design methodology.